When half the Victoria Line went down yesterday afternoon due to "flooding", it seemed like just another day for TFL.

In fact, as pictures published later that afternoon revealed, half of the Victoria Line, between Warren Street and Brixton, had ground to a halt because private contractors working on the £700m rebuilding of Victoria Station for London Underground managed to pour large quantities of water and cement into a signal control room.

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This wasn't me (honestly) but a lady I work with arranges insurance for high-value personal property. She had a husband and wife client and the husband phoned to insure a new piece of expensive jewellery.

She later needed to ask a few further questions and phoned their home number. The wife answered and my colleague asked to speak to her husband. When asked what about (as he wasn't there) she said it was regarding their insurance. The wife then said that it was ok for her to talk to my collegaue, as she knew all about the insurance and what did she want to know?

My collegaue said that it was about the new piece of jewellery and the wife said, "what new piece of jewellery?". My colleague died inside at that point..

Luckily, it was a present for the wife, rather than a mistress, but that phone call to the husband was one of the worst she's ever had to make.

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I once worked in a fruit distribution warehouse - we had a contract with one of the big 4 supermarkets. Control wasn't great - nothing was where it should be and fruit was going out date left right and centre. So everyone misplaced pallet got pulled out for me and my job was to get it relabelled or the customer would tell me to sell it off to the sunday market guys.

One day the boss comes up and tells me senior management are due the next day and to hide the 40 pallets I was working through. I juggled pallets and found space 40 foot up in the air as far from the office as possible. Next day came and went, nobody noticed. I told the boss after I needed them back down to carry on. Don't worry, he said, the customer's in-house team know and will decide.

4 weeks later, he told the night shift one Friday to chuck it all int he compactor. But they only got 30 pallets in before it was full. The following day I was on duty, and arrived to discover a rotten fruit juice lake buzing with flies in the summer heat. The smell is beyond description, I'll take it to my grave. To make things worse, 30 minutes later the in-house customer accountant turned up because we were so bad we hadn't given him his monthly stats, so he was pulling overtime. He spotted me, and asked WTF was the lake outside. I played the dumb new graduate card and shrugged looking as clueless as possible.

He was no idiot and knew without asking where the remaining 10 pallets were, marched over and told me to get one down. Sadly he picked a pallet of watermelons that had split, saturating the cardboard and leaving it very weak. As the top prongs of the forklift bumped onto the bottom prong as it came down, the top 9 layers collapsed on the bottom one, sending rotton watermelon juice all over us. Me and the forklift guy had full protective kit on and were fine. He had a suit worth several weeks salary and shoes you could see your reflection in. He was soaked. The look on his dripping face was thunder. The next pallet was charentais melons, which are about the size of a grapefruit. They were so moudly, the mould had bridged the 10cm gap between each melon. His comment was that they'd do for a fur coat, but not for eating.

Monday morning came and of course you couldn't move for senior directors on both sides. I explained my side to a senior VP, produced emails I'd sent to my boss warning him and kept my job. My boss was gone by 3pm. Moral of the story, if a junior guy tells you something important and you ignore it, if they persist with it you'd better at least hear them out for your own benefit.

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On my first day as senior designer working in the internal studio of a large UK institution, I told the assembled staff that I thought our first priority should be to completely reassess their branding as their current logo was "a mess". It transpired that the brand had only just been rolled out by that team and my boss. Oops.

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Once (I've got loads of these) I got sent to a client's office in a featureless block in Wembley.

Somehow, I managed to get the directions up to the client's reception horribly wrong. Before I'd realised it, I'd opened a fire door out onto the roof. It shut behind me with a resolute thunk, leaving me no option but to walk round the roof trying to find another way in.

Turning a corner, I spotted my work colleagues and the client all looking at me in bewilderment through the windows of their meeting room. They had to open a window for me to climb in, in front of everyone. Awkward.